Landscapes & Nightscapes by Luis Argerich

Mechita

Mechita is a very small town at about 160km from Buenos Aires. It was now a very busy train station where formations were stored, mantained and dispatched to several different destinations. Today it’s a museum of train formations, some of them being restored for public display. The collection of trains and equipment made this small town a great place for movies and photo shootings, while the trains are nice I usually focus on the landscape around so here we go.

Dry trees at Mechita

The landscape around Mechita is characterized by the typical infinite visibility grasslands of the Buenos Aires plains, some trees can be found most of them planted to provide some shade for the cows and horses. The plains are characterized by dry and wet cycles, when the season is dry many trees die because of the lack of water. On a rainy season everything is wet, full of mosquitos and the rivers flood the nearby terrains.

Unforgiven

If you like to see trains in really different states of abandon you should really visit Mechita, they are all over the place, some of them are in garages being restored but others are just on the field alone at the mercy of the weather. It’s interesting to study how quickly the heavy machines are attacked by nature, the paint peels off, plants start to grow from small oxidation holes on the floors and wasps make their nests in the shaded corners. Every abandoned train is now a small ecosystem.

Gate to rural road

On the side of all the routes crossing the Mechita landscape you will find rural roads, many of them are public, others are private and some of them are a mystery. As the lands are mostly cultivated some landlords put gates and locks on the roads that lead to or border their properties. Without a lock you are usually welcomed to cross gates and drive around but it’s really difficult to know when you are in public open space and when you are inside a private property.

Moulin

As you can see there is not even a hint of a minimal hill in the landscape. The terrain is so flat that on a clear day the visibility can break world records, you can see more than 50 or 100 miles ahead sometimes and distances become hard to judge. How far this windmill is? It can be 2 miles ahead or maybe 60. When driving visibility makes you feel everything is close but once you have driven for an hour and you are still seeing your goal at the same distance things change.

Mechita is the forgotten trains land, right in the middle of the flat Argentinian plains and near the city of Bragado, a nice place to visit and certainly a different place if you are not used to the Argentinian countryside.